Never Stay Still

It was awesome to experience last night’s Shopify LDN Meetup. Huckletree in Shoreditch was heaving and Ricardo Williams and the team put on a great evening, with Olly White sharing the unvarnished truth about his entrepreneurial journey and and awesome panel from Shopify Plus (Graham Glyn), Klaviyo ( Andra Secrieru ) and We Make Websites ( Piers Thorogood ) accompanying him.

Stuff that struck me from Ric’s chat with Olly:

• Brand is key. Olly was modest enough to suggest that Goose & Gander hadn’t necessarily made a conscious choice a decade ago to focus on building a killer brand, but they have and it’s the brand’s strength that carries / drives everything else. No company is going to be great across the board and that brand picks you up where you’re not nailing it.
• Anyone in the room run a brand and not on Shopify? Move! Now.
• Systems and processes are awesome, but don’t wait for the perfect systems environment before pushing yourself to grow aggressively. Olly referenced the business going into overdrive without a stock system or carrier integrations etc. and they made it through. And the lessons learned were fed into the business as they continued to grow. Which led to…
• BFCM 2021 being the smoothest week of their year. Ric referenced the massive step Goose & Gander took during that period, but Olly and his team had mapped everything out, run rehearsals, agreed short term leases, invested in product and by the time they got to Black Friday were a smooth, well oiled machine. Fascinating to see that development.
• Handling Shopify in-house until they were clearing £1m+ in revenue meant that Olly and his team had a wealth of knowledge and experience on the platform that they’ve found invaluable when leveraging agency support, because they understand their own strengths and weaknesses.
• When developing features and making changes to your eCommerce store, understanding and projecting the expected Return On Investment is key. Every development choice you make is a commercial decision and for Olly and his team, every new feature they deploy has an expectation defined for it of what it will deliver commercially.
• You don’t have to have a problem to solve to start a business. Just start a business.

The Panel and Q&A session covered a whole range of topics, but in the interests of me not burning any more of your day and cutting to the chase, I thought I’d highlight each panellists closing piece of advice for the meetup:

• Focus on the customer and out them at the heart of every decision you’re making - Piers
• Never stay still - Olly
• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes . Subscribe to your own email. Buy from your own store - Andra
• Lean on Shopify support and the app / 3rd party ecosystem - Graham